by Asa Avdic
I tried to sit up, but my body didn’t quite obey me. Katja took hold of my arm and stuck a needle into it.
“You’ll feel better soon,” she said, and she switched to shining a small flashlight right into my eyes.
“Your pupils are still a little sluggish, but that’s perfectly normal. Do you think you can sit up?”
I tried again, and it went a little better this time. I managed to straighten out my upper body and pull myself into a sitting position. All at once everything was spinning, and I fumbled for something to hold on to. Katja caught me, and the room around me slowed down. I felt her falter a little as I clung to her arms.
“Anna, listen to me. I understand you don’t feel very well right now, but we’re in a bit of a hurry. I have to seal up the chest freezer, and you have to get down to the Strategic Level before anyone else comes knocking here. The colonel is upstairs waking the others, and we’re supposed to meet in the parlor in ten minutes. He’s still dead drunk, so he’s not moving too fast. Are you able to make it down now?”
I realized that I was not lying on a cot; I was in the chest freezer. Just as this occurred to me, I also felt how cold it was around me. As if reading my mind, Katja took a shiny foil warming blanket from a shelf behind her.
“Take this with you! You have to get down there right now!”
Katja pressed the refrigeration coil on the wall of the freezer and the hatch opened. She looked considerably less sporty and fit than she had when I met her on the dock. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot.
“How did the colonel take it?” I asked her.
“Not well. Listen, we can talk about this more later.”
She looked anxiously over her shoulder, as if she had seen a noise rather than heard it. With effort, I turned onto my stomach and tried to find the ladder below me with trembling legs.
“I’m going to lock this up now, so no one can open it. You can open it from the inside, using the code, but don’t do it unless you have to.”
I nodded, grabbed the warming blanket, and threw it down the hatch. Just before I vanished, Katja put her hand on mine.
“Good luck.”
She closed the lid of the chest freezer and I heard the lock click as she pressed down. I was alone in the darkness.
I FUMBLED MY way down the ladder. At the bottom I wrapped the warming blanket around myself again and felt for the light switch on the wall behind me. The yellow light made it feel like evening, although it was almost dawn. I approached the refrigerator on shaky legs, found a bottle containing some sort of sports drink, and drank it in large gulps. My lips felt numb; my tongue was still like a clump of cement in my mouth, and a trickle of the artificially sweet beverage ran from the corner of my mouth and down my neck. I wiped it away with my sleeve, up near my shoulder, in a way you do only when you’re absolutely certain you’re alone.
I walked over to the little sink and splashed cold water on my face until I started to perk up. My tongue was starting to shrink back to its normal size. I put the warming blanket aside, dug through my bag, and found an undershirt to put on. Then I went over to the door that led to the secret world of the house, the territory between the walls, and walked in. Still shivering, I groped my way up the narrow staircase and reached the curtain that signaled I was on my way to the wall of the parlor. I found the molding and then the holes, pulled aside the hatch, and looked into the room.
NOT EVERYONE HAD arrived yet. Katja was standing closest to the peepholes in the wall, her back toward me. I assumed she had chosen that spot so that I could see as much as possible of the others. Jon was sitting on a chair in ridiculous striped flannel pajamas, looking around drowsily. Next to him sat Franziska in an elegant orange robe with ruffles, her hair still in its usual severe bun, and it looked like she had even taken the time to put on some makeup, or else she had never washed yesterday’s off. When Jon looked in the other direction, I noticed that she took the opportunity to adjust the fabric at her cleavage. Lotte was sitting beside Jon in a terry-cloth robe with thick socks on her feet, absentmindedly rubbing her bangs until her hair stood straight up. Next to Lotte was the colonel, in sweatpants and a fleece jacket, red eyed. And then Henry entered the room. I gasped. Just a few hours before, he had been lying naked beside me, and now my hand automatically went to my lips. He cast an indecisive look around the room, then sat down on a chair and aimed an attentive gaze at the door. I got the impression that he was waiting for someone, likely me. Franziska immediately began to complain about why she had been forced to get out of bed, her voice loud so everyone would hear. Katja cut her off and took the floor.
“Thank you for being here, all of you. I’m sorry for rousting you all out of bed in the middle of the night, but the fact is . . . something has happened.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Anna?”
This was Henry, interrupting her. He looked around the room again, as if I were there somewhere and he had only missed me. Katja turned to him.
“That’s just it. I don’t quite know how to say this, but . . .” She took a deep breath and went on.
“Anna is dead.”
Although I was completely prepared for her to say something along those lines, a shudder still traveled through my body. Anna is dead. If I were to die for real, here and now, no one would have any reason to come looking for me. As far as these people were concerned, I was dead now. It felt creepier than I had expected. I tried to concentrate on what was happening in the room instead of dwelling on that thought. Everyone was staring at Katja as if they didn’t understand what she was saying. They looked like overgrown children, with their bewildered faces and nightclothes.
“And unfortunately, I must also inform you that it seems someone has killed her.”
I tried to let my eyes move from person to person and make note, in my mind, of their reactions. Jon just stared at Katja with his mouth agape, as if she were speaking an incomprehensible language. Beside him, Franziska looked as if she were frantically searching through her mind for the right question but coming up empty-handed. Lotte looked around the room nervously as she distractedly pulled at her thumbnail like she wanted it to come off, and the colonel hung his head heavily. He was, of course, the only one who wasn’t surprised. Just a little while before, he had carried my body to the chest freezer in the medical station. I wondered what his face had looked like then.
But of course, most interesting of all was Henry’s reaction. Not just because it was him, but because it was different from the others’. He shrank down as if he had been shot in the back, and now he was bending forward wearily and breathing so hard that his shoulders heaved. Katja tried to give a brief account of what had happened, how she had found me in the kitchen when she got up to get a glass of milk, how she had woken the colonel and how they took me to the chest freezer and locked my body up inside it. Henry stood up suddenly and walked over to Katja; he said something to her in a low voice. I couldn’t hear what it was, but when she responded I knew that he had asked to see me. Katja addressed the whole room:
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I have already been in contact with the secretary, who has given me very clear instructions. The body is in a sealed freezer down in the medical station and no one may open the freezer or touch the body before we have called in personnel who are able to follow procedure for this type of case.”
Only then did the rest of the room appear to grasp what they had just heard, and a muddle of questions and speculations broke out. Everyone was talking over one another, and it was hard for me to keep up. Franziska had finally found her footing and was peppering Katja with one question after the next: What had happened? How had it happened? Was she sure it wasn’t an accident? Was Katja truly qualified to determine such things? And when would the rescuers arrive? She had absolutely no intention of remaining on an island where this sort of thing happened, and she demanded to be allowed to call the Chairman person
ally and right away.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible either,” Katja said again, mechanically, and I wondered how many times she would have to say this before the stay was over. “The communication radio in the basement appears to be out of order.”
“What did you just say?” This was the first time the colonel had opened his mouth.
“The first time I contacted the secretary it worked just fine, but the call got cut off, and when I tried to call again it didn’t work. It could be because of the weather.”
This was new to me too, and I wondered how it had happened. Was it really true that the storm had knocked out communications, or was Katja lying so that Franziska wouldn’t run off and call the Chairman? I tried to convince myself that it was the latter, but I couldn’t help but think that it seemed like a bad omen. Apparently the colonel felt the same, because he suddenly appeared more sober than he had before.
“That’s not good,” he said succinctly.
“Couldn’t she have killed herself?” Lotte suddenly said to no one in particular. When she noticed that everyone’s eyes were on her, she went on, her hands tugging and scratching at each other anxiously in her lap. “I mean, I don’t know Anna, but from the little I’ve seen, well . . . she seemed pretty strange, unhappy. Maybe she experienced some sort of trauma while she was gone, and then she came here and . . .”
Lotte’s voice grew increasingly louder and faster, as if she were trying to convince herself.
“She told me she had left her child behind and went down there and was part of that war for extended periods, and when I asked her about it she just stopped talking and looked devastated and . . .”
“No, she didn’t kill herself,” Katja interrupted.
“How do you know? Depression is common in people who have experienced that sort of thing. It has a name . . . post-traumatic stress? Maybe she . . .”
“You can’t strangle yourself,” Katja said bluntly.
“But . . .”
Lotte deflated a bit and said nothing more.
“She wasn’t the type,” Henry said, almost to himself, but no one responded; everyone in the room was silent, except for Lotte, who began to sob quietly and wiped away a few tears with the sleeve of her robe. As I stood there in the dark, cramped space, watching the others, I felt my legs going numb beneath me and a cold sweat begin to trickle down my forehead.
“Could there be someone else on the island?”
This was Jon. He looked at Katja and then, I noticed, at the colonel. Apparently those were the two he expected a sensible answer from. The colonel appeared to consider the question before responding.
“It’s a possibility, of course. We’ll have to search the island as soon as we can, but before then we should probably try to figure out what happened last night. Who was the last to see Anna?”
I turned my focus to Henry. Since he’d walked up to Katja and demanded to see me, he had collapsed back into his chair and just sat there, head hanging. But now he responded, still without raising his eyes.
“It was probably me.” And then something inaudible.
“What?” said the colonel.
“I said, I was sleeping when she left. Last I saw her she was in my bedroom; she was there when I fell asleep, and when Katja woke me up she was gone.”
He raised his eyes. He looked absolutely broken, which made me happy in some peculiar way. I tried to force myself not to stare just at him, but to watch others as well. Jon grinned when he realized what Henry’s words implied, but then he seemed to catch himself and his smile vanished. I felt uncomfortably embarrassed that everyone on the island now knew that we had slept together, and I wondered what the Chairman would think of this little improvisation. I assumed he wouldn’t appreciate it, but it was too late to do anything about that now. The colonel didn’t comment on what he had just learned. Instead he said, in a neutral tone:
“And do you have any idea what the time was when you fell asleep?”
“It was after two, but probably before three.”
“So that means there’s a gap up until Katja found her on the ground floor around four.”
I noticed that the colonel was still looking at Henry as if he wanted to ask further questions, but he didn’t say any more to him; instead he began to methodically inquire how each person present had spent their evening and night. He himself had gone to bed just after midnight, and so had Lotte; Katja reported that she had done the same. When it was Jon’s and Franziska’s turns, they both seemed oddly unwilling to give any exact details, until it turned out that they, too, had left the group together and gone up to his room “for a nightcap,” as they put it. Franziska had left his room around two, which made me gasp. I might have run into her in the hallway, which would have made everything that much more complicated.
“What kind of teenage behavior is all this?” Lotte exclaimed.
“I was under the impression that we had the right to a private life here,” Franziska snapped back. It seemed to me that she was the least concerned of anyone in the room; she was still most irritated about how everything affected her personally.
Once everyone had given their statements, the room grew quiet again. Everyone was looking at the colonel, and I made a mental note that he was the one who had taken command of the situation. Or maybe it was more like the others had given him command. I hoped I would remember how this conversation had proceeded; my brain still felt fuzzy from the drugs, and my legs were starting to shake with the effort. I wondered how much longer I could stay in the wall without fainting, and I prayed to myself that they would soon be finished.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” the colonel said, once he had sat in silence for a while. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Considering the sedative and how much he’d had to drink the evening before, he seemed surprisingly sharp and clearheaded. “It’s starting to get light out. We’ll divide up into two groups and search the island to find out whether we’re alone or not. But before we do that I want to say two things.”
The others looked at him as if he were their teacher.
“The first is that we must remain calm. We must not become frightened, because fear is the most dangerous thing of all. No one accuses anyone of anything. We don’t know what happened, and we’re not going to jump to conclusions before we find out.”
He allowed his eyes to wander from one person to the next; it seemed to me that he looked at Franziska for an extra-long time.
“The second is that we must be careful. I saw Anna’s body too, and from what little I know about pathology I agree with Katja. She had been strangled.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment and looked down before he continued.
“That means that either there are more people here on the island, or else . . .”
He cut himself short. I noticed that Lotte’s eyes were large and frightened as she looked around the room at all the potential murderers. Clearly it had not occurred to her earlier that this was the most likely scenario. I hadn’t expected that she would react so poorly to the situation. Emotionally shaken, slow to realize the obvious. My experience in Kyzyl Kum would have suggested otherwise, that the mothers usually handled the pressure best, while the cocky men like Jon were the ones who broke down. I wondered if she would have reacted differently if her children had been on the island, and made a mental note to include this perspective in my final report.
“What are you trying to say?” she said in a dull voice.
The colonel turned to her.
“I’m saying that none of us should be left alone. We have to stick together, all the time. We can divide up into groups, but no one goes off by himself. We keep an eye on each other. That’s all we can do right now.”
Inside the wall, my legs were shaking, totally out of control, and cold sweat was running down my neck and chest. My vision danced with dark spots. If I
didn’t sit down or get something to drink, I would pass out. The colonel’s voice began to sound distant. He stood up.
“I suggest we do this: everyone goes up to his room to change clothes, but don’t close the door all the way—let’s make sure we can hear one another all the while. Then we’ll meet back down here in five minutes and go outside together.”
No one was opposed; they all began to leave the room slowly, as a group. I stayed put for a few seconds, staring out at an empty room, before I began to make my way out of the wall on wobbly legs, heading back down to my underground lair.
RIGHT FROM THE start, the secretary had admitted that there was a major shortcoming with the ancient surveillance system—I would lose contact with the participants as soon as they left the house. There was no way for me to follow them outside.
“There is a camera directly outside the front door, but it has proven impossible to put up any others. They just get blown right down,” the secretary explained. Instead of arguing that he should mount his cameras a little better, I asked him what I should do if the group left the house.
“I suppose you should take the chance to recuperate,” he said. When he saw my hesitant gaze, he went on: “I would seriously recommend that you follow my advice on this point. You’re not going to get much sleep during these couple of days, so you’ll have to get what you can in small doses when you have the chance. Go ahead and sleep if they go out. If you’re able.”
I just about fell face-first on the staircase down to the Strategic Level. The secretary’s advice seemed so much more reasonable now than when I first heard it. I staggered to the fridge, grabbed another one of the energy drinks that took up half the space inside, and drained it in one gulp. Then I pulled over the warming blanket and sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting to feel better. The trembling in my legs slowly abated, but my head still felt heavy and inert, and the soft lights and muted colors in my little bunker made me feel even more sluggish, as if I were underwater.